Jet Biofuel Enlisted For Contrail Control

Contrails might be a punch line in the culture these days, thanks to the imaginative folks who have rechristened them “chemtrails” and embroidered them with elaborate theories involving government and corporate misdeed.

But contrails are pretty serious business for a less conspiratorial reason: scientists believe these ice clouds generated by water exhaust gases from aircraft engines could have a real impact on the climate, perhaps by cooling temperatures during the day and warming them at night.

That’s where a new phase in an ongoing NASA study comes into play: The space agency recently began doing flights over the Southern California desert in which a DC-8 “flying laboratory” is testing the contrail consequences of using standard JP-8 jet fuel versus a 50-50 blend of JP-8 and a biofuel made from camelina plants.

“We believe this study will improve understanding of contrails formation and quantify potential benefits of renewable alternate fuels in terms of aviation’s impact on the environment,” said Ruben Del Rosario, manager of NASA’s Fixed Wing Project.

In its flights, the DC-8 is soaring to elevations as high as 40,000 feet, trailed all the while by a Falcon HU-25 equipped with “more than a dozen instruments” that can help the researchers understand the composition of the soot and gasses emitted by the DC-8 “and monitor the way exhaust plumes change in composition as they mix with air.” NASA said the Falcon will snuggle up to within 300 feet of the DC-8. It will also look for opportunities, weather and air traffic controllers permitting, to trail commercial aircraft, but in those cases the Falcon will be 10 miles in back.

According to the European Centre for Research and Advanced Training in Scientific Computing (CERFACS), “Contrails are ice clouds that form by condensation of water vapor exhaust from aircraft engines and develop further in the aircraft wake as they are entrained by the airplane trailing vortices.”

When contrails spread to form cirrus clouds, they can persist for hours and extend over areas of several square kilometers. These “contrail cirrus,” which artificially increase Earth’s cloudiness and become almost indistinguishable from natural cirrus, are among the most uncertain contributors to the Earth’s radiative forcing. (Radiative forcing is defined as the change of the net radiating flux resulting from changes in the atmospheric composition. A measure of the perturbation of Earth-atmosphere energy budgets, it is widely used as a climate metric).

NASA said its testing program, which began on Feb. 28, would last up to three weeks. A second phase of the flights, dubbed ACCESS – Alternative Fuel Effects on Contrails and Cruise Emissions – is planned for 2014 with “a more extensive set of measurements.”

It might be interesting to see if NASA will by then test a 100 percent biofuel mixture – Canadian researchers pulled off such a flight last fall and found “an important reduction in aerosol emissions (50 percent)” and “a significant reduction in particles (up to 25 percent) and in black carbon emissions (up to 49 percent) compared to conventional fuel.”

Angel Hernandez

Sorry!!! I Know whats a Contrail Vs Chemtrail.. You are trying to desaprove whats real and whats not real. Chemtrails are real!!! And a real threat to our Health… And Yes Contrails are made from ice clouds that form by condensation of water vapor exhaust from aircraft engines but diminish within about 4 minutes. And yes Chemtrails form to artificial cirrus clouds and persist for hours and extend over large area blocking our sun rays… I never trust NASA and never will. Nasa should make Chemtrails in Mars to see if they can produce these cirrus clouds.

John Powell

Mars doesn’t have an atmosphere so the production of contrails (condensation trails), or chemtrails if you are less scientific, would be unlikely. On the subject of ‘chemtrails’, stop worrying yourself to death!

Jorge Enrique

Geo engineering and climate control; Alluminum sulphate, Barium ferrite and stereate; go for a trip around the world on utube. Look at what everyone is seeing in their skies. Experimenting everyday everywhere? . Who is financing it ? Where do you replenish your tankers? Is Barium hazardous to your health? You bet.

Jonathan Shaw

Hey Pete Danko, why don’t you go back and look through your childhood photos, and see if you can find just one picture from before 1990 or so that shows even two of these so called persistent contrails. Maybe if you’re imaginative enough, you can embroider them with some, but I guarantee that you won’t find one. Go ahead and search old videos from outside sporting events from the 1980s. You won’t find one that shows “persistent contrails” unless it’s from an airshow where they are purposely making smoke, like one of the photos that the liars present as proof that jets have always done this. I challenge you to add a link to footage that has been widely available from before 1990 that shows “persistent contrails”. I have been scouring hours and hours of golf footage from the PGA championships and other events, and I haven’t found one yet. I specifically chose these events because there will be many photos from those events that are in the hands of people already, just to keep the chemstains from being tempted to offer up altered footage or video of the event.